The Seventh Seal

Returning exhausted from the Crusades to find medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight (Max von Sydow) suddenly comes face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death, and challenges him to a game of chess. As the fateful game progresses, and the knight and his squire encounter a gallery of outcasts from a society in despair, Bergman mounts a profound inquiry into the nature of faith and the torment of mortality. One of the most influential films of its time, The Seventh Seal is a stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning and a work of stark visual poetry.

An annotated, illustrated Bergman filmography, featuring excerpts from Wild Strawberries and The Magician with commentary (box set only)

Optional English-dubbed soundtrack

New and improved English subtitle translation

PLUS: A new essay by Cowie (box set edition); a booklet featuring a new essay by critic Gary Giddins (two-DVD and Blu-ray editions)
New cover by Neil Kellerhouse (two-DVD and Blu-ray editions); new cover by Gordon Reynolds (box set edition)

An annotated, illustrated Bergman filmography, featuring excerpts from Wild Strawberries and The Magician with commentary (box set only)

Optional English-dubbed soundtrack

New and improved English subtitle translation

PLUS: A new essay by Cowie (box set edition); a booklet featuring a new essay by critic Gary Giddins (two-DVD and Blu-ray editions)
New cover by Neil Kellerhouse (two-DVD and Blu-ray editions); new cover by Gordon Reynolds (box set edition)

Cast & Credits

Cast

Max von Sydow

Antonius Block, the knight

Inga Landgré

Karin, the knight's wife

Gunnar Björnstrand

Jöns, the squire

Nils Poppe

Jof (Joseph)

Bibi Andersson

Mia (Mary)

Bengt Ekerot

Death

Åke Fridell

Plog, the smith

Inga Gill

Lisa, Plog's wife

Credits

Director

Ingmar Bergman

Cinematography

Gunnar Fischer

Screenplay

Ingmar Bergman

Music

Erik Nordgren

Editing

Lennart Wallén

Related Films

Related Films

From The Current

In recent years, The Seventh Seal has often been honored more for its historical stature than its prevailing vitality. Those who attended its first international rollout and were changed forever by the experience are now second-guessing their attachm

For more than forty years, The Seventh Seal has been a benchmark by which all other great foreign films are judged. It launched the international career of its director, Ingmar Bergman, and made a star of its 27-year-old leading actor, Max von Sydow.…

Max von Sydow has spent the past six decades cultivating one of cinema’s most illustrious careers, and now, at eighty-seven, the Swedish actor “may be on the verge of becoming a pop-culture icon,” writes Terrence Rafferty in the Atlantic.

This week, Time is all too happy to judge a movie by its cover. Gilbert Cruz, an editor at the magazine, has compiled a list called “Top 10 Cool Criterion Collection Covers.” Cruz’s taste in design tends toward illustration over photography, th…

In compiling his top ten Criterions, Cronos director Guillermo del Toro had a hell of a time limiting himself. Del Toro humorously bemoaned the “unfair, arbitrary, and sadistic top ten practice,” so instead he decided on ties or rather, “themat

Caitlin Kuhwald designed the covers for Criterion’s editions of Heaven Can Wait, The Thief of Bagdad, and Amarcord. She lives in Oakland, teaches illustration at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and is a full-time freelance illu

In Stockholm, an auction of personal belongings from the estate of the great director Ingmar Bergman has just ended. The items ranged from parts of his daily life—his writing desk and wastepaper basket—to the chess set used in The Seventh Seal. B…

“In trying to come up with a ten best list from the Criterion Collection I thought first of Trouble in Paradise and decided to go online to find the rest. But after only seven pages of Criterion’s online list I already had more than enough for te

Like Gary Giddins in his recent Criterion essay, Andrew O’Hehir, in an engaging and sharp new DVD review for Salon, sets out to refute the long-held misconception that Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is a humorless, medicinal monolith. Pointing…

As I write this, it has been a year and a half since Ingmar Bergman passed away—and I miss him daily. I miss his imagination and the comfort he gave, both personally and through his films.
I got to know director Ingmar Bergman through my job as a c…

The first time I “met” Max was in May of 1959, when Bergman’s stunning production of Urfaust came to London for just one week in the World Theatre Season. Groupie of all things Swedish that I was, I waited outside the stage door at the end of t…

Peter Cowie has provided commentaries for around a dozen Criterion titles. His latest book, Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever, is available from Rizzoli.

Nov 20, 2008

Explore

Ingmar Bergman

Writer, Director

The Swedish auteur began his artistic career in the theater but eventually navigated toward film—"the great adventure," as he called it—initially as a screenwriter and then as a director. Simply put, in the fifties and sixties, the name Ingmar Bergman was synonymous with European art cinema. Yet his incredible run of successes in that era—including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring, haunting black-and-white elegies on the nature of God and death—merely paved the way for a long and continuously dazzling career that would take him from the daring “Silence of God” trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence) to the existential terrors of Cries and Whispers to the family epic Fanny and Alexander, with which he “retired” from the cinema. Bergman died in July 2007, leaving behind one of the richest bodies of work in the history of cinema.